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Evil in the sense of "amoral opportunist" can be a lot of fun, and my favorite playthrough of the Baldur's Gate series was along those lines. Evil in the sense of "psychopathic to no purpose" is never interesting, however. I also really, really enjoyed the renegade options in the ME series by and large. Playing an "ends justify the means" vigilante is a really nice change of pace from the usual drippy saint protagonist of most RPG's.

as per usual, vinraith has summed up my position on a topic and i need not add more.

(but i do want to highlight the success of the mass effect series in this area. i don't think it got the praise it deserved for the renegade side of things. remains to this day the only game(s) i fully enjoyed playing through twice as good/"evil" to see the different interactions).

I generally play a good-two-shoes character in any game, just going with what my gut says is right in any given scenario. But the 'evil' side is generally poorly implemented, pointless psychopathy in most cases, which makes it unappealing and uninteresting.

I did like the Paragon/Renegade system in ME3 though. In ME1 and 2 it felt a bit too black and white, but in ME3 I found myself taking the renegade choices quite regularly (for example a certain asshole on the Citadel, my finger was reaching for LMB before the renegade prompt even popped up).

It may be my nostalgia tainting my view here, but I also enjoyed being evil in Fallout 2. Evil in Fallout 2 was very much to the tune of unscrupulous profiteering selfishness, regardless of who else got harmed. And you benefitted from it, there were great and very real gains to be made screwing people over or murdering people for what you wanted. I never felt as though I was being evil for evil's sake, I felt as though I was simply being a bastard and taking what I wanted, because I had the power to.

Evil in the sense of "amoral opportunist" can be a lot of fun, and my favorite playthrough of the Baldur's Gate series was along those lines. Evil in the sense of "psychopathic to no purpose" is never interesting, however. I also really, really enjoyed the renegade options in the ME series by and large. Playing an "ends justify the means" vigilante is a really nice change of pace from the usual drippy saint protagonist of most RPG's.

I'd love to play an Ammon Jerro-type evil. Y'know, colludes with demons, but for the greater good. :P

NalanoH. Wildmoon
Director of the Friends of Nalano PAC
Attorney at Lawl
"His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy." - Woody Allen

Like so many here, I tend to end up playing a Saint even when I try to do something else. When I started KOTOR2 I decided I'd go all evil and dark side, but ten hours in and I'm full light side. Sigh.

This. This is me, I started playing KOTOR and said to myself that I was going to play a Sith...20 minutes later I was faced with a choice of ruining all these peoples lives and I buckled - Light side for the rest of the game.

As a kid I used to love playing evil, conjuring up dead and all that. Nowadays though I pretty much end up playing good, but ready to go against the rules if I deem it morally right. Chaotic Good then. In MMOs I always pick the "good" side, because their environments are pretty and bright, but that may be because here we can spend months without seeing the sun so I don't need grim from my gaming experiences.

What bothers me is that NPC's tend to see me as the next Messiah, whether I have a 'good' or a 'bad' reputation. This often kills immersion, because it's obvious that these NPC's only exist as XP-generators. The writers try to make this plausible with some ridiculous dialog, but it doesn't work for me in most cases.
Therefore I tend to play 'evil' first. And 'evil' here means: I don't care about your problems, just give me XP and more loot. It's very sad.

I always start out thinking I'm going to be some kind of rogueish neutral and end up being far more good than I'd intended. I then playthrough again thinking "what would an evil bastard do here" and have twice as much fun. It changed my DAO experience from good to outstanding.

I generally have to play as good/nice as I possibly can. The reason being many games seem to cut out rewards/content if your nasty to someone and I canít stand missing out on stuff so Iím always sucking up to NPCs and seeking their approval in the hope I will get stuff in return.

The only games that are exempt from this is the Dragon Age/Mass Effect series. I played full renegade in ME and a snarky bastard in both Dragon Age games. I think the reason for that is the main character is a pivotal part to enjoying the series, especially in Mass Effect when you have to put up with the same person for three whole games, so it makes things more interesting to have someone who isnít bending over for everyone they meet.

My problem is that I almost always wanna decide based on the context or case and never by going evil or good from the beginning. So most of the time I end up firmly in the middle. Having said that, I loved F:NV having a 'no god, no master' option at the end. I also don't find the 'kill everyone' option very appealing, I keep thinking afterwards what quests I might have missed.

I don't normally approach games with a good/evil dichotomy in mind. Save the village and get rewarded a magic stick? I want a magic stick! Does that make me good or mercenary? My responses to NPCs will normally vary depending on how much they've annoyed me, I don't like to go around being mean and ruining people's lives for no reason, but I have slaughtered a village because it was just too infuriating.

I normally take the good path, doing all the evil things along the way. Primarily because good people get more quests.

"Commander Hero Knight, my cat is stuck in that house!"
Without the cat quest, I couldn't enter the house. And there is delicious XP and loot in that house. Also, maybe a shrine of cat-worshippers who I can kill.

Fable 3 starts with the choice to kill your unbearably goody-goody lovey-dovey boy/girlfriend or a group of revolting peasants. Choosing your lover is the Good choice... I only chose it because they were terrible.

Witcher 1 was fantastic in that I got the neutral ending and did good wherever I could. It was one of the few cases where I didn't feel like I was 'gaming' a morality system and that it was an organic process.

Also Mass Effect's renegade options were great in certain instances. The way they are 'timed' means that it needs to be a quick response and doesn't allow you to contemplate for too long.

SPOILER
I was playing mostly Paragon in ME2 but had some kind of conference call with the council who started giving me lip even though I risked people to save them in ME1. I lost my cool and hung up on them. It doesn't sound very dramatic but it's great that it lets you act so dynamically.

I usually play as myself. It's a wonderful morality exercise unless the game forces options on you that you would not even consider otherwise. Bioware's good/bad polar extremes morality usually conflicts with this quite a bit. The Witcher on the other hand does a wonderful job with it's shades of gray options.

As for D&D alignment I usually go with Chaotic Good, I guess that's my fantasy of myself whilst in real life I'm probably more along the lines of Lawful Neutral. XD

I tend to do two play-throughs on any RPG with a sort of binary (1=good 0=evil) alignment system, so your Mass Effects and such - I'm a sucker for CRPGs in general, so I like to experience all the content. I far preferred my renegade Shep though. When the universe is at stake, sometimes you just need to shoot some dickish aliens in the face and fuck the consequences.

But yeah, in those rare games where morality is a shade greyer, or you get real choice, I tend to go for Neutral Evil. The most fun character I've ever played in a game was a character on a NWN persistent world who was loosely based on Al Swearengen from Deadwood -, loyal as far as it suited his own selfish interests, a slight cruel streak, but with his own brand of sentimentalism that could cloud judgement. Elegant use of bad language makes any character fun too. Burning down an inn because it poses a business threat to your own run-down establishment makes for a more interesting character than someone who 'just wants to watch the world burn' (Batman films notwithstanding).

Heh, glad to hear I'm not the only one who reloads a game after doing something evil :)

There was this character in the Shivering Isles expansion for Oblivion who asked you to kill him, so he wouldn't have to commit suicide. When you looted his body after pushing him from a great height (thus doing what he asked), you'd find a key to a box in his home, containing a magical ring and a thank you-note. I found this sequence of events so sad, and felt so bad about it, I replayed almost two hours just to keep him alive. I'm a softie, I guess ;)

This always sucks for me. I like playing "evil", but love the classic Paladin playstyle...I'm a turtle by nature. Unfortunately, I have the devil of a time trying to find any game where the Devs have done a good Anti-Paladin that stays true to the turtle concept.

I'd love to play an Ammon Jerro-type evil. Y'know, colludes with demons, but for the greater good. :P

It's incredibly rare to find it in an RPG (and even ME doesn't get it right all the time, by any stretch) but by far the most satisfying type to play IMO is someone whose intentions are good but whose methods are at best morally gray. It's even better if that comes back to bite your ass later (one reason I'm very fond of certain parts of ME3) without just seeming like the game punishing you for not playing "right." That is to say, the ends work out but the personal cost is significant (I had quite a causalty list by the end of ME3, and too many of them were by my own hand...).

As for D&D alignment I usually go with Chaotic Good, I guess that's my fantasy of myself whilst in real life I'm probably more along the lines of Lawful Neutral. XD

Most CRPGs guide you very strongly towards chaotic actions. Do you rob NPCs blind when their back is turned? (for the greater good of course...). Or maybe you take quests where you agree to kill someone just because some NPC tells you they are bad and deserve to die? The typical "good" in RPGs comes close to a self-deluded form of evil no matter how many "save the orphan" quests the game throws in to make you feel better about yourself.

True lawful good is rarer in games than lawful evil You could RP it in some games but it would mean missing out on a lot of quests and loot so most people wouldn't.

I loved the quest in NWN2 where the evil option had you co-operate with corrupt city officials and take bribes for doing so, earning extra gold. That's the way it should be. Good should be harder to maintain than evil and lawful good should be the hardest alignment of all.